1. Field of Invention
This invention relates to a technique for non-invasive and real-time measurement and monitoring of a wall thickness of an industrial piping component or pump fluid machinery having a media flowing therein.
This invention also relates to a technique for monitoring trends in the wear of walls of an industrial piping component or pump fluid machinery.
More particularly, this invention also related to using these techniques in relation to media such as an abrasive fluid or a slurry.
2. Description of Related Art
Historically, flow measurements in the mineral processing industry have suffered from the limitations of previously available flow meter technology including commonly used instruments such as ultrasonic meters, electromagnetic meters, turbine meters, orifice plate meters, vortex flow meters, Coriolis meters, and Venturi meters. Sonar array flow measurement technology, which entered the mineral processing industry a few years ago, has overcome many of these limitations. The development of this technology began with the specific goal of non-invasively measuring multi-phase flows in the petroleum industry. The same technology was later adapted to the mineral processing industry where it has experienced rapid adoption.
By way of example, there has been a long history of using ultrasonics based nondestructive testing to determine the wall thickness of metallic pipes. To date this method of determining wall thicknesses has been costly, unreliable, and of limited use for trending wear rates.
In view of this, there is a need in the industry to reduce the high labor costs associated with the known method and to decrease the variance found in these manually performed measurements.